Aardvark'd
I finally had time to finish the Aardvark’‘d DVD.
This is a documentary about four interns working in Fog Creek Software, which cofounded by Joel Spolsky, on a project code-named “Project Aardvark”.
The whole process from kick-off meeting, development, usability testing, demo in expo and final launch was all recored in this roughly one and a half hour DVD. Problems like dealing with different persons, bugs, socialize were faced by all these interns. Interns were interviewed on expressing their own ideas on software development, as well as personal adoptation to new working environment.
What interests me was the appearance of Paul Graham in the show. In the interview, Paul briefly expressed his view on hackers and ideas on start-ups. He also talked about Y-combinator, the startup incubator which offer funding to very-early startups.
In Hong Kong, I could hardly see any software(I don’‘t really like the term “IT”) internship that could attracts really great geeks’’ resume like Project Aardvark did. The first reason is probably there is still don’‘t exist a tech-firm which is good or wide-known enough to attract all good resumes. The second reason is, international tech-giants don’‘t usually have tech-centric position in HK, most they offer are sales positions. Contests or awards are probably remained opportunities to dig or train good hackers in HK.
The most popular software-related contest/awards in HK is probably the HSBC Young IT Entrepreneur Awards. This program attracts hundreds of new ideas every year. The werid thing is, seems students in Hong Kong are not so interested in studying computer science, so where were all these ideas came from? Also, from what I heard, reports and presentations totally outweighted technology factors in the judging process. Plus, throughout the years, I can’‘t see there is any real product coming to market from this awards. So, I really doubt how many of the participants are real geeks that could really make things.
Most founders of highly successfuly software companies are really good hackers. They all definitely have some “presentation” technique to ask for seeding fund from CVs, but they are all able to hack tough problems and make things that really work.
And the fact shows us that, in the world of software or so-called “IT”, hacking and working out something solid is more important than proposal and presentations which required by most IT awards/contest in the territory. Just as a statement from the frontpage of Y-combinator,
We care more about how smart you are than how old you are, and more about the quality of your idea than whether you have a formal business plan.
